Meet the Team

Faculty

Aaron P. Johnson, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Psychology

Prof. Johnson has been at Concordia since 2006. His research investigates human vision in real-world environments while performing real-world tasks. His research spans a range of areas from low-level computational models of vision, to applied research in the fields of marketing, aviation, and low vision rehabilitation.

Rick Gurnsey, Ph.D.

Professor, Psychology

Prof. Gurnsey has been a professor at Concordia since 1992. His research focuses on vision across the visual field, and on improving statistical analysis used in the field of Psychology. He has recently published a new textbook on Statistics for Research in Psychology , which focuses on confidence interval estimations.

Lucia Farisello, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Psychology

Dr. Farisello has been at Concordia since 2014. Her research investigates psychophysiological and self-report measures of arousal to visually explicit sexual imagery and videos. She is also developing better self-report questionnaires to explore sexuality and arousal.

Walter Wittich, Ph.D.

Prof. Wittich has been at the University of Montreal since 2014. His research investigates dual sensory impairments (e.g., vision and hearing loss), and how these may impact other areas of older adults health (e.g., Cognition).

Postdoctoral Fellows

Caitlin Murphy, PH.D.

Postdoc, Psychology

Dr. Murphy research investigates the physiology of the retina in individuals with visual impairment using the Scanning Laser Opthamoloscope imaging modality. Her research is building a database of images of individuals with visual impairment, with behavioural and cognitive measures, allowing both researchers and clinicians to better understand how vision loss impacts other areas of health.

Leon Franzen, PH.D.

Postdoc, Psychology / JMSB

Dr. Franzen is a horizon postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Johnson and Prof. Grohmann (JMSB). His doctoral research at the University of Glasgow investigated the perceptual mechanisms involved in Dyslexia. At Concordia, he will be working on visual marketing behaviour.

Graduate Students

Elliott Morrice, MA.

PhD Candidate (Clinical & Research Option), Psychology

Elliott’s research investigates if (and how) visual impairment impacts measures of cognitive assessment. He aims to develop substitute measures for commonly used cognitive assessments that can be performed without vision. More information

Maria Santaguida.

PhD Candidate (Research Option), Psychology

Maria’s research investigates the acute effects of alcohol on individuals’ subjective and psychophysiological responses to visual sexual stimuli, using eye-tracking, genital thermography, and self-report measures. Her research also focuses on the role of sex-related alcohol expectancies in risky sexual decision making. More information

Simon Dubé.

PhD Candidate (Research Option), Psychology

Simon’s research investigates how individuals’ psychophysiological and subjective responses to sexual stimuli relates to their sexual preferences using eye-tracking, EEG, genital thermography, and self-report questionnaires. His research is also interested in the emergence of new interactive/immersive sexual technologies (e.g., sociosexual artificial intelligence/robotics, virtual/augmented sexual reality). More information

Karine Elalouf

PhD Candidate (Research Option), Psychology

Karine’s research investigates how arousal can change our choices during decision making. She uses the delayed discounting paradigm to explore this, exploring different commodities including money and sex.

Arash Sharma

MSc Candidate, JMSB

Arash’s research investigates behavioural economics, and how visual cues impact our decisions to part with money. He is particularly interested in how charitable donations are influenced by the visual cues in the advertisement.

Sam Clement-Coulson

MA Candidate (Research Option), Psychology

Sam’s research investigates human factors involved in aviation. He is interested in pilot training and the layout of the aviation flight deck (e.g., instrumentation). More information

Zoey Stark

MA Candidate (Research and Clinical Option), Psychology

Zoey’s research investigates how different font types (e.g., OpenDyslexic, Times New Roman) impacts reading performance in a Dyslexic population. She uses eye tracking to observe if the different fonts lead to changes in the characteristics of the eye movements, and changes to the attentional window.

Brandon Huard

MSc Marketing Candidate, JMSB

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Austin Trudeau

MSc Marketing Candidate, JMSB

With a primary focus in behavioural economics and delayed discounting paradigms, Austin’s research surrounds the impact of emotional affect on decision-making.

Having completed his undergraduate thesis in collaboration with the Marketing Faculty at the John Molson School of Business (Laboratory for Sensory Research) in 2018, he is currently conducting follow-up study, given his previous findings.

Undergraduate Students

Corina Lacombe

Research Coordinator

Corina’s research investigates how scene perception impacts anxiety using psychophysics and EEG/heart-rate/eye-tracking.

She is also interested in using psychophysiological measures to assess self-reported stigma towards low vision assistive devices.

Stephanie Pietrangelo

Researcher, Psychology

Stephanie’s research is linking the Drusen present in the retina of individuals with low vision with their cognitive abilities. Longitudinal research has demonstrated that individuals with Drusen are up to four times more likely to develop dementia and Alzheimer’s disease compared to age-matched older adults. Her research will investigate this at the level of the individual.

Sophie Hallot

Undergraduate, Psychology

Sophie’s work investigates the impact of call quality on a video conference application using self-report measures and eye tracking.